Award Coatings
the proving groundMy floor coating company in Phoenix. Every system I talk about — lead follow-up, quoting, scheduling — runs this business first. If it can't survive a real Monday here, it doesn't get shared.
awardcoatings.com ↗
open to real work
jadenraats*
I run a floor coating company in Phoenix and use AI to run it better. This is where I show other business owners how to do the same — real systems, tested in real operations, explained in plain English.
about*
Operator first, builder second.
Most AI advice comes from people who've never run a business. I run Award Coatings — leads, quotes, crews, callbacks. Every system I share exists because something in that business was eating my week.
If a tool survives a real Monday, I'll show you exactly how it works. If it doesn't, you'll never hear about it. That's the whole filter.
work*
Hermes
multi-agent assistantI built an AI assistant that pulls nine different apps into one place, ran it as its only user for 55 days, and then wrote down everything that broke. Total cost: $14.15.
read the teardown ↓AI tools & playbooks
for business ownersPractical systems and plain-English guides for owners who want AI doing real work — not another subscription collecting dust. The first ones land here soon.
case study*
I built an AI assistant, then wrote down everything that broke.
I was capturing work in eight places and finding it in none of them. Links in one app, ideas in another, tasks somewhere else — plus five AI agents that couldn't see each other's work. The problem was never lost data. It was that I couldn't get anything back out.
9
apps unified
2,142
messages
$14.15
total cost
55
days live
So I built one front door. Everything goes to a chat app, and which chat you send it to decides where it ends up. No AI guessing your intent — you already made the decision when you picked the chat. It gets filed automatically, and every conversation from every app lands in one searchable place.
capturetelegram · slack · imessage · cli · cron
gatewayalways-on process, routes by destination
stateone sqlite db · full-text search
homesobsidian · todoist · drive
The fix wasn't code.
Six weeks in, it broke for two weeks and I didn't notice. When I came back, I didn't rewrite anything — I wrote down the filing rules on a single page that both I and the agents could read. Same code, same models, four times the use.
before
after
days used
28%
53%
messages / day
21
87
What's still broken
This is the part most write-ups leave out. All of it is still true as of today.
A 14-day outage that never alerted anyone
An expired token plus two automations pointing at a folder I'd deleted. Nothing crashed — it just quietly stopped working, and I stopped using it without deciding to. Silent failure is worse than loud failure.
The one scheduled job is still broken
It refuses to run because a safety check is doing its job, and its error notification can't send. The job meant to keep the system from needing me is the part that needs me. I automated the filing before I automated the monitoring.
I measured the wrong things
I tracked cost and message counts because they were free to collect. I never tracked whether I could actually find what I'd saved — the only number that would have justified the whole project.
The useful lesson wasn't technical. The system didn't fail because it couldn't do enough — it failed because the rules for where things go lived in my head instead of on a page. Writing them down cost an afternoon and did more than six weeks of building.
contact*
say hello*
Running a business and wondering what AI can actually do for you? Ask. Open to consulting and select contract work — if it's real work, I'm interested.